Making money through traditional methods, such as sale of the use of individual copies and patent royalty payment, is more difficult and sometimes impractical with open-source software. This complaint is countered by a large number of alternative funding streams such as:
Giving the software for free and instead charge for installation and support (used by many Linux distributions)
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* Make the software available as open-source so that people will be more likely to purchase a related product or service you do sell (e.g. OpenOffice.org vs StarOffice)
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Cost avoidance / cost sharing: many developers need a product, so it makes sense to share development costs (this is the genesis of the X Window System and the Apache web server)
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Studies about security in open-source software versus closed-source software show that closed-source software have fewer advisories but open-source software usually has less time between flaw discovery and a patch or fix. However, having the source code for a program could also make it easier for a malicious person to discover security vulnerabilities that they can take advantage of (instead of reporting or fixing them).
Click here to view arguments based on open source and close source.
- Giving the software for free and instead charge for installation and support (used by many Linux distributions)
>* Make the software available as open-source so that people will be more likely to purchase a related product or service you do sell (e.g. OpenOffice.org vs StarOffice)
>
- Cost avoidance / cost sharing: many developers need a product, so it makes sense to share development costs (this is the genesis of the X Window System and the Apache web server)
>Studies about security in open-source software versus closed-source software show that closed-source software have fewer advisories but open-source software usually has less time between flaw discovery and a patch or fix. However, having the source code for a program could also make it easier for a malicious person to discover security vulnerabilities that they can take advantage of (instead of reporting or fixing them).
Click here to view arguments based on open source and close source.
Written by Omar, Created by Cannelle Cuvelier